Taking off from Chicago, a DC-10 ends in charred fragments At 3 on a sunny Friday afternoon, thousands of Chicago motorists lucky enough to get off to a fast start on the long Memorial Day weekend streamed out along Interstate 90. Brisk winds rippled the green field between the crowded highway and O'Hare International Airport. Half an hour later, the field was shrouded in black smoke, and firemen held hoses on a flaming aircraft engine. Police and other emergency workers ...

If the U.S. economy had leaped from its worst five-month stretch in recent history to a record-breaking surge, Barack Obama could proudly announce, "The Great Recession is over." The country's finances have seen no such dramatic upturn, but in the movie business they're singing "Happy Days Are Here Again." The Hollywood hills are alive with the sound of money, and on this holiday weekend the cash registers were caroling with the top Memorial Day frame ever. Moviegoers ...

Over the past few years, an increasing number of worn-out consumers have reached for a bottle of Vitaminwater after a workout. The sports drink has emerged as a serious competitor to Gatorade and other noncarbonated beverages, so much so that Coca-Cola forked over $4.2 billion in cash to buy the brand from Glaceau back in 2007. On its July 21 earnings call, Coke CEO Muhtar Kent was particularly bullish about Vitaminwater, which is now being sold in ...

Birds of a feather flock to Rio, and so do audiences everywhere. Fox's 3-D animated carnival, the high flyer at last week's box office, saw nothing but blue skies its second time around; it earned $26.8 million, according to early studio estimates, to win the Easter weekend at North American movie theaters. The colorful love story of two blue macaws also keeps charming the rest of the world: it has amassed $204.7 million in foreign climes ...

They called him by fanciful code names -- Top Hat, Bourbon, Donald, Roam -- and on the days when his latest cache of secrets would arrive at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, a CIA officer says, "it was like Christmas." There was something for everyone. The names of four U.S. military officers working as spies for the Soviet Union. Hard evidence of Beijing's deepening animus toward Moscow, which President Nixon exploited to forge his 1972 opening to China. Technical data ...

Just an hour from Johannesburg, sprawling across hundreds of square kilometers of veld, lies a UNESCO World Heritage site known as the Cradle of Humankind, where many of the world's oldest human fossils have been unearthed. But while it may be an anthropological El Dorado, the Cradle is also emerging as an unlikely nursery for arts and culture. At its heart lies the Nirox arts foundation, www.niroxarts.com, a four-year-old arts complex built on land jointly owned by ...

Two months after the writer David Foster Wallace killed himself, his agent, accompanied by his widow, went into his garage office to look through his papers. It was Thanksgiving weekend, 2008, and the weather was cold and gray in Claremont, Calif. On Wallace's desk they found a neat stack of around 200 pages containing several chapters of a novel called The Pale King. His agent, Bonnie Nadell, knew he'd been working on it. A lot of people did: ...

Let the discounting begin. Bargain-hunting shoppers turned out in droves for Black Friday markdowns, but they didn't open their pocketbooks as widely as last year, according to several retail firms tracking the data. As a result, retailers are only cautiously optimistic heading into the mainstream holiday season, including today's Cyber Monday, and experts believe that many stores will likely have to revamp promotions and discounting plans to ensure that inventories will be cleared by Christmas. Already, ...

It's Sunday morning in Hollywood, and the experts have declared the winners and losers of the weekend box office, for which the celebrity contenders were Jim Carrey in Disney's A Christmas Carol, George Clooney in The Men Who Stare at Goats and Cameron Diaz in The Box. Headline in The Wrap: "$31M Lump of Coal for 'Christmas Carol'." And from Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood: "Happy Holidays? Not for Stars: Carrey, Clooney, & Cameron Open Soft This Weekend." Meanwhile, Variety ...

Parents may have fond memories of Maurice Sendak's classic children's book, "Where the Wild Things Are." But if their social-networking postings are any indication, some are not pleased with the movie. "It was joyless. There were maybe 15 minutes of the hour and a half that my kids were into it," said James Griffioen of Detroit, Michigan. His 4-year-old daughter asked, "Why is this movie so sad" in the middle of their family's matinee viewing, while his son, a 20-month-old ...